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UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it. A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters.

But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment. It started with the Boston marathon bombing, four years ago. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird was sifting through thousands of tweets sent in the aftermath and noticed something strange. Too strange for a university professor to take seriously.
FBI-led investigative team examines role of conservative news sites in Russia campaign. Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.

Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said. The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said.

Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Bannon and Gorka have controversial profiles.
Everywhere You Look, Americans Are Spreading Hate. EXCLUSIVE: Nazi-Allied Group Claims Trump Aide Gorka As Member - National. Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser, is a formal member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S.

Steve Bannon’s betrayal of Breitbart: White House at “war” with right-wing site over immigration and Trumpcare. There appears to be a movement afoot to create an appearance of distance between White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon and the right-wing website he used to run, Breitbart News.

Either that or the chaos and dysfunction that has consumed President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office has left even his most diehard supporters willing to turn their backs on him. A new report this week claimed that the right-wing website’s “honeymoon with [the] establishment wing of [the] Trump White House may be over,” more than a month after another report claimed Breitbart’s former CEO turned White House mastermind was “furious” with his former publication. According to Business Insider, the former Breitbart chairman is simultaneously attempting to run White House policy and strategy, while maintaining control of the site’s coverage.
More Bomb Threats Close Jewish Community Centers Across The Nation. America's extremist battle: antifa v alt-right. Image copyright Getty Images.

Gen. Michael Flynn has resigned from his position as national security adviser.
The Nationalist Right Is Coming for Reince Priebus - The Atlantic. Breitbart News has a target in its crosshairs following the departure of former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn from the White House in a cascade of scandal over his contacts with the Russian government: White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

The White House Put Stephen Miller On Four Sunday Shows To Dodge, Lie, And Attack The Media. The White House Offered One Official, Stephen Miller, To Four Sunday Shows And Snubbed CNN Entirely Senior Advisor To President Trump Stephen Miller Made Sunday Show Appearances On ABC, NBC, CBS, And Fox Broadcasting.

Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Donald Trump, appeared as the representative for the administration on the February 12 editions of ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’ Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday. [ABC, This Week, 2/12/17; NBC, Meet the Press, 2/12/17; CBS, Face the Nation, 2/12/17; Fox Broadcasting Co., Fox News Sunday, 2/12/17]
Free Speech and the Paradox of Tolerance – Julia Serano – Medium. Any time activists (regardless of affiliation) protest a public speaking event, or the publication of a particular book or article, there will inevitably be claims that such actions threaten “free speech” or constitute “censorship.”

Lately, these sorts of claims have been heard following the presidential-inauguration-day silencing (via punching) of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer while he was being interviewed, and after protesters attempted to force the cancellation of Brietbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’s speaking engagements at University of Washington and UC Berkeley. Some people who take such a stance do so for purely political reasons — they share Spencer’s and Yiannopoulos’s views, and invoke “free speech” to make their ideologies appear unassailable.

Many others who do not share these views may instead adhere to free speech absolutism, and their reasoning might be summarized as follows: I think that “freedom of speech” is a lovely aphorism.
Trump, Breitbart, and the rejection of multicultural democracy. What you — yes, you — can do to save America from tyranny. Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism.

Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
M.facebook. Researchers baffled by nationalist surge. Eric Gaillard/Reuters Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front, is challenging the mainstream parties. Waves of nationalist sentiment are reshaping the politics of Western democracies in unexpected ways — carrying Donald Trump to a surprise victory last month in the US presidential election, and pushing the United Kingdom to vote in June to exit the European Union. And nationalist parties are rising in popularity across Europe. Many economists see this political shift as a consequence of globalization and technological innovation over the past quarter of a century, which have eliminated many jobs in the West.

And political scientists are tracing the influence of cultural tensions arising from immigration and from ethnic, racial and sexual diversity.
Antibody Reduces Harmful Brain Amyloid Plaques in Alzheimer's Patients. Although the causes of Alzheimer's disease are still unknown, it is clear that the disease commences with progressive amyloid deposition in the brains of affected persons between ten and fifteen years before the emergence of initial clinical symptoms such as memory loss.

Researchers have now been able to show that Aducanumab, a human monoclonal antibody, selectively binds brain amyloid plaques, thus enabling microglial cells to remove the plaques. A one-year treatment with the antibody, as part of a phase Ib study, resulted in almost complete clearance of the brain amyloid plaques in the study group patients. The results, which were realized by researchers at UZH together with the biotech company “Biogen” and the UZH spin-off “Neurimmune,” have been published in the renowned science journal “Nature.”

Reduction of brain amyloid plaque is dependent on treatment duration and dosage. Whose Alt-Right Is It Anyway?